


Thing With Feathers

by Scratch_Pad



Category: Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries
Genre: A little angst, Character Study, F/M, Inspired by Poetry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-11
Updated: 2019-07-11
Packaged: 2020-06-26 14:57:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19770610
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scratch_Pad/pseuds/Scratch_Pad
Summary: Jack is thinking about Phryne, transience and poetry. An aviary.





	Thing With Feathers

**Author's Note:**

> I've been noodling endlessly over a longish story around the idea that Jack has come after Phryne, on the assumption that this is a transitory adventure; Phryne is not so sure. This bit grew into something that seemed as if could stand alone. I'm kind of a pessimist about how these two could work it out given the realities of the 1930s, but one can always hope!

Miss Phryne Fisher, the celebrated aviatrix, was wearing some thing with feathers. Flocks of party-goers in jewel-bright gowns swirled around her, laughing and singing in high voices, the air was blaring with jazz, and she raised her white throat and red mouth in the center of it all and laughed.

Jack Robinson, the obscure and earthbound, was wearing his increasingly threadbare black tuxedo. He watched her, smiling slightly, from his refuge behind some potted plants.

He had done his bit. He had danced, and talked, and met Dame this and Sir that, and the famous authoress of something-or-other, and then danced some more. He had fed on quail’s eggs and hothouse fruits, drunk a vintage purple wine from Provençe. Now with his head lightly spinning he had faded into a dim corner to recover, and to watch Phryne.

The multicoloured froth she wore around her shoulders could hardly have kept her warm in the chill of the June evening. He wondered if she had chosen those feathers to remind him of a night in Melbourne a year and half, and a lifetime ago, when her naked slim legs had emerged from behind a pair of outrageous dyed-pink ostrich fans. Probably not—he didn’t think she had even noticed he had been there. But for himself, he held that memory close. Into his heart that night had fluttered a feeling he had though would never visit him again—delight.

It had been years since he had read much poetry, but he had gone home that night to thumb through his battered little book of Rilke. And there she had been, immortal already in poetry—”Flamingoes”, _sie verführender als Phryne—more seductive than a Phryne,_ soft pink, black and _fruchtrot,_ hidden fruit-red…burying herself in her own softness.

He had hardly dreamt then that she would ever have stepped from the imaginary into his world, or that he would see her, _sanft von Schlaf, soft with sleep,_ real, his lover. Even for this brief summer.

He had worried about all the idle time he would have coming here, five weeks on a ship with nothing to do but think. To think, unless he preoccupied himself with the job at hand, was to be filled with unhappy memories and future dreads. But he had surprised himself. All duties suspended, a stranger to everyone, the world slipping dream-like past, he had rocked in his little bunk and read back over his old books; Shakespeare, Rilke, anthologies of English verse, a volume of metaphysical poets given him by an English officer in France. He could not remember when when he had last felt so simply happy.

She was dancing again, high-kicking to a raucous number, an upward trill of clarinets accenting each flip of her skirt. She was too fierce for a flamingo, he decided. Something more magnificent, powerful _…midsummer flower—_

_Gentle as a falcon_

_Or hawk of the tower:_

_With solace and gladness,_

_Much mirth and no madness,_

_All good and no badness…_

Or, would no mortal bird would do for her? She could only be something mythical, unreal; a Firebird, or a Phoenix, that had burnt alive down to ash, and sprung up again and again, blazing, immortal.

And what was he? A carrion crow, or a vulture, he supposed; something drab, with an unsavoury interest in dead bodies. Not something people wrote poems about, anyhow.

Well. It was all right. Through the familiar aching of his heart, watching her he felt content. He would allow this moment to alight on the palm of his hand, and it would gladly fly away from him, and it would be all right.

The pink and gold was fading in the west, but the greying sky was still full of swallows, darting and piping in the evening air.

_Oh fleet sweet swallow, changing swallow, soft, light, fleeting swallow…_

Jack leaned his elbows on the old stone balustrade and tried to catch at the half-remembered verses.

_O sweet stray sister, O shifting swallow,_

_The heart's division divideth us._

_Thy heart is light as a leaf of a tree;_

_But mine goes forth among sea-gulfs hollow…_

“ _The world will end when I forget.._ ” He murmurmed.

“So this is where you’re hiding,” an amused voice said behind him.

His head swivelled around, and he blinked slowly at her. Phryne laughed and slipped her arm through his. “You looked like one of the stone statues, you were so still. Having fun?” She was also, it seemed, floating rather high on champagne, and she pulled him into a slow, gentle dance, humming, and he mirrored her steps without thought.

“I am, in fact,” he smiled, bending his head to hers. “Lady Ward has been showing me her orchids. There are some…interesting specimens here.”

“Oh?” she arched a brow at him, with a shadow of a frown, and he tilted his head at her innocently.

“You do realise you’re that rarest of birds here—”

“A penguin?” he quipped, gesturing at his tuxedo. Phyrne gave him a shove with her elbow, and broke away from their dance.

“—a presentable single man of marriage age.” She took a few steps away, pretending to admire the view. “I’ve had a half-dozen people asking when I intend to release you from my talons…” she added lightly.

Jack raised his eyebrows. “And then one of these exotics is going to come back to Melbourne and live on an Inspector’s salary, are they?”

“Oh, I think you’ll find this lot could keep you in the style to which you have become accustomed, Jack.”

Jack blinked over this idea for a moment, nonplussed. “And what style is that? It doesn’t take much,” he mumbled. “Cheese sandwiches and whiskey.”

“Ooonly a bird in a guilded cage…” Phryne crooned ironically. Her faced clouded with that puzzling, uncharacteristically uncertain expression she had taken to wearing sometimes. “You’ve never asked anything of me, Jack. Not for one crumb.”

He didn’t know what to say to this, so he didn’t say anything.

She closed her eyes and raised her arms, stretching, and the swallow pin glinted on her breast.“Something reminded me of you the other night. Come on, let’s get out of here.”

_Phoenix and the turtle fled_

_In a mutual flame from hence…_

He would do for a turtle-dove to her Phoenix perhaps…but that was the wrong poem, the wrong theme, twinned souls and eternal faithful love. Although _married chastity_ was oddly appropriate for their relations until recently…

She led the way, as she always did, and he trailed after, as she flitted through a series of walled gardens. The bright colours of her dress glowed in the dimming green, mesmerising him. She slipped them through a gate and they came out into an open field, dark shapes of bushes ambiguous in the dusk. Jack had forgotten how much closer the horizon felt in England than it did back home, how the folds of the hills seem to enclose one in a little world.

“It was around here last night—” Phryne’s steps became stealthy, and she crept forward slowly. Jack followed, bemused.

“Here—” she breathed. She sank softly down to sit in the tall dewy grass, and drew him down behind her. She nestled his legs around her hips, and he folded her in his arms, and she sighed and leaned back against him. They breathed quietly against each other's warmth, and Jack felt his heart beating hard.

“This is what had me thinking of you, Jack,” she said after a moment.

“A small thorn-covered bush. Yes I can see that…”

“Hush.” She tapped his arm reprovingly. “You need to be very quiet and patient, and listen.”

This, Jack could do. He obediently calmed his breath and stilled his body, and waited. With her soft warm body nestled in his, he would quite happily have waited forever.

Quiet experimental pipings. A repeated whistle, then a trill, then a full-throated warbling song filled the night air. They sat and listened, and Jack could feel the tears prick at the back of his throat. He swallowed and held her closer.

“You can just see him—look—”

The little nightingale was close enough that through the dark leaves they could see the light gleam on its black eye and throbbing pale throat.

“Drab little fellow,” Jack said wistfully.

The song rippled through the air around them, subtly shifting and modulating through complicated trills.

He felt her tense and sadden. The song had flown her mind, like his, back to the same place, and the same time, to France or Belgium, to a green field much like this one, one torn and clogged with wire, and the night closing in. To why all those lovely women back in that beautiful house had no mates to pair with. To waiting for the faithful voice of the nightingale to lift over a lull in the sound of the guns.

 _“...when her mournful hymns did hush the night…”_ Jack murmured.

“Talk to me Jack,” Phryne sighed, “Say anything, anything you like.”

A thousand unwise words weighed on his tongue. He reached instead for his old familiar friend.

_“But that wild music burthens every bough_

_And sweets grown common lose their dear delight._

_Therefore like her, I sometime hold my tongue,_

_Because I would not dull you with my song.”_

“…Jack…”

 _“Luscinia megarhynchos,”_ he crooned into her ear, and slipped his hand warm along her thigh. They said nothing else for some minutes, and her soft cries joined the nocturnal sounds.

“They pair for life, you know. Swallows.” Phryne’s voice was muffled, her face hidden his sleeve.

“Hmmm.”

She turned slightly to meet his eye.

 _“Hmmm?”_ she parroted.

“I also have it on the highest authority,” he said quietly, “That they do not mate in captivity.”

“We could—”

“Phryne…please don’t.”

“Alright,” she huffed softly.

They sat together and listened, long after it had grown dark.

[A nightingale song-](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INzqozVbYL8)YouTube

Jack’s snatches of poetry are from:

[Flamingoes](https://allpoetry.com/poem/11870944-The-Flamingos-by-Rainer-Maria-Rilke)\- R.M Rilke

[To Mistress Margaret Hussey](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50011/to-mistress-margaret-hussey), John Skelton

[Phoenix](https://kalliope.org/en/text/lawrence2001061778), DH Lawrence 

[Itylus](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45294/itylus), C. Swinburne

[The Phoenix and the Turtle](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45085/the-phoenix-and-the-turtle-56d2246f86c06) and [Sonnet 102](http://www.shakespeares-sonnets.com/sonnet/102) , W. Shakespeare 

[Ode to a Nightingale](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44479/ode-to-a-nightingale), J Keats 

And the Thing With Feathers, according to Emily Dickinson, is [Hope. ](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42889/hope-is-the-thing-with-feathers-314)


End file.
